DESIGN AND ULTIMATE REASON

“We might ask whether there were impulsive, random acts by Jesus, acts without purpose. Healing one person, but not another? A turn down one road rather than another? Cursing this fig tree and ont that one? Did every event involving Our Lord have some design and ultimate reason? If we answer yes, as no doubt we should, we are acknowledging as well that even the smallest hours in our life can be part of the divine plan for our souls…A God who descended to a crib and the obscurity of a carpenter’s shop may want alertness to his presence even in the smallest choices. he wants all in in a life to be offered to him. If we do not attend to that thought daily, we miss many opportunities for an offering to him that otherwise could be thought simply the endurance of a day’s difficulties.”

–Fr. Donald Haggery, from Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God

“I wonder if contentment is really a virtue? Like balance, it can so easily slip over into indifference or fence straddling….One clear example for me is that I am called at this moment both to love the monastic life and to be an active layperson in the world. At first, it seemed to me that the tension was unbearable, and that I should ‘fish or cut bait’ I ought to choose between one or the other, and give up the longing/desire for the unchosen one. Yet was unable to choose and gradually I began to see that, right now, God calls me to have a foot on both sides. It may look like fence straddling to some, but to me it feels like a bridge, a conduit through which communication becomes possible in a way it would not without someone like me, someone content with being ‘mixed.’ The tension continues, but the contentment predominates.”

–Norvene Vest, from Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict

These quotes help get at what I was reaching for in two recent vidoes, both in some way about the concept of “order.”

I have a foot in a few different worlds: this world, which is not of His Kingdom the world of 12-step recovery which has some overlap but far from perfectly or completely dovetails with my convictions as a follower of Christ; the world of a visible, active, participating member of the Mysticl Body of the Church; my interior, “real life…where I live not now, but Christ lives in me…

Or something like that! It is often a lot of tension to bear as there are different groups of people who I love and in some rudimentary sense want to serve, people in the various worlds with very different approaches to and convictions about life; people who want, need, approve or disapprove of my own beliefs and approach to life…So how to stand my ground and, be true to my own beliefs, while simultaneously trying to be a peacemaker. How to refuse to allow my beliefs, convictions and speech to be compelled by others, while living out my beliefs without trying to impose them on others….

I’m a writer so to simply state and try to articulate my beliefs is not to try to impose them, it’s to try and share them, for those who are interested. .

Also my time and energy are limited. So how to make boundaries but not barricades? How to honor my very real limitations while also stretching as far as I can…knowing that I am going to and do often fail and falter? Knowing that in the stretching I can become impatient, rigid, and judgmental…

Talking to a friend the other day, I laughed, “I feel like a slave. A slave who doesn’t do a very good job.”